CoreWeave Buys Part Of Former Merck HQ In New Jersey For Data Center Campus
Artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave has acquired part of a northern New Jersey tech campus on which it is already leasing a data center, as the firm looks to own a larger share of its data center portfolio.
CoreWeave is paying $322M to purchase a 280K SF building that it previously leased, along with an adjacent 27-acre land parcel brokerage firm Newmark announced Friday.
The property is part of the 107-acre, 2M SF Northeast Science & Technology Center in Kenilworth, New Jersey, the former headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Merck.
The seller, a joint venture between Onyx Equities and Machine Investment Group, pitched the campus as a tech, life sciences and innovation hub after acquiring the property for $187.5M in 2023. The campus contains office, lab, and research and development space. The site also already houses key infrastructure for data centers such as a 50-megawatt substation, on-site power generation and chiller plants.
In October, CoreWeave signed a lease for the 280K SF building. It said at the time that it planned to spend $1.2B converting the former lab and manufacturing facility into a data center, with the property’s then-owners contributing $50M.
The campus is located roughly a half-hour drive from CoreWeave's headquarters in Livingston, New Jersey.
For CoreWeave, the acquisition marks the second major transaction to own, rather than lease, more of its data centers.
The company brands itself as “the AI hyperscaler,” with computing deployed across 32 data centers with a combined 360 MW of active power as of the start of this year.
But unlike other hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon or Google, CoreWeave didn't own or operate any of its own data centers, at least until last month. Its entire portfolio was leased from third-party providers like Chirisa, Digital Realty Trust, Lincoln Rackhouse and Flexential.
This lack of control over its own data center infrastructure was among the key operational and financial risk factors identified by investors — and by CoreWeave itself — ahead of the firm’s initial public offering in March.
CoreWeave’s first move to address these concerns came in July with the planned acquisition of graphics processing unit data center provider Core Scientific in a $9B all-stock deal. CoreWeave was already contracted for 840 MW of capacity from Core Scientific, and the deal gives the cloud provider ownership of 1.3 gigawatts of capacity in Core Scientific’s U.S. data center portfolio.
CoreWeave executives were explicit in attributing their motivation for the Core Scientific deal to the need to own more data centers to alleviate investor concerns, with CEO Michael Intrator saying the deal “enables CoreWeave to significantly enhance operating efficiency and de-risk our future expansion, solidifying our growth trajectory.”
CORRECTION, AUG. 8, 11:10 A.M. ET: A previous version of this story misstated the property that was sold, citing incorrect information from a Newmark press release. This story has been updated.
